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Thursday, September 12, 2013

Review: Police by Jo Nesbo tr. Don Bartlett

If you've read PHANTOM
then you'll be wanting to know what happened to Harry Hole. If you
haven't read PHANTOM then you'll be wondering after a hundred pages
plus, where is this Harry Hole, especially given that the
cover shouts out “the new Harry Hole thriller”.

The friends of Harry
have been brought together by Harry's old police boss Gunnar Hagen to
form an unofficial small task-force to solve the latest serial
killing spree. The victims are police officers and they are being
killed at the scenes of unsolved murders, ones where they themselves
were part of the investigation team. The team comprises Katrine
Bratt, on loan from Bergen, Beate Lonn and her sidekick Bjorn from
Forensics and psychologist Stale Aune and they are working out of the
familiar, over-heated room in the basement.

As well as the murder
plot there are also several plotlines carried over from PHANTOM
including the rise and rise of Police Chief Mikael Bellman and the
decline of his enforcer/friend Truls. There is also the matter of the
tall coma victim kept under armed guard who seems to be waking up.

Indeed there are so
many plotlines that it's impossible to cover them all but the tension
is relentless; from the first hundred and forty pages where you want
to say “just tell me what happened to him”, to the terrifying
murder scenes and the overlapping narratives – where the story cuts
away at critical moments to another character, delaying the
resolution. In Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo has created one of crime
fiction's most charismatic heroes and this is reinforced by his
absence from the investigation team. Fans of Harry Hole and Jo Nesbo
will enjoy POLICE and be thoroughly absorbed in this typically
well-plotted, complicated story with its many misdirections and dead
ends. There is a lot going on and not all is neatly tied up at the
end.

After the grimness of
PHANTOM and the extreme violence of THE LEOPARD, POLICE is more akin
to the earlier novels in the series, emotionally similar to THE
REDBREAST, and as always, I can't wait for the next one.